Anyone done channel injection before?
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One of our clients has a number of TVs around their facility, including in every patient room. They want to be able to inject their own programming on to the cable feed. Just a loop of promotional video. In an ideal world it would be like a general promotional video feed on something like channel 3, with sub-specialties on other channels. They would be happy with a single channel solution though if that is all we can easily get. Has anyone ever done such a project before? We have never taken on such a project before and I really have no idea where to start. Naive Google searches for "channel injection" leads me nowhere. I have spoken to Comcast and they said that they do not explicitly prohibit it, but this would put us in an unsupported configuration where the first step of troubleshooting would be to disconnect anything that we do and if that fixes it then we are on their own and they do not have any off the shelf way to do what we want to do.
Alternatively we might consider something like Compute Sticks on all of the patient room TVs reading the videos from a network share. The client would prefer channel injection though.
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This seems to be something like what you're asking.
Unfortunately, I suspect it's not cheap.
http://contemporaryresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/SVC_08_11_CableTV.pdf
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@anotherusername ...god, it cannot be that complicated can it?
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Yes
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
@anotherusername ...god, it cannot be that complicated can it?
I'd (naively) think that you'd have to demux the streams, add a new one, and stuff it back together in a very particular format.
Could you just instead use a local, low-power TV OTA broadcast? Like those adapters for car stereos that broadcast FM at low power?
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@benjamin-hall said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
I'd (naively) think that you'd have to demux the streams, add a new one, and stuff it back together in a very particular format.
Due to it being a large business installation there are no cable boxes. We have a standard cable stream to work with. What we are talking about here is basically the same thing that VCRs used to do. Tune to channel 3 and play the VCR, other channels are unaffected.
Or am I missing something here?
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Actually... did you find this?
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/35-cable-digital-cable-non-hdtv/997493-inject-channel.html
Maybe this?
http://www.justhdmi.co.uk/modulated-hdmi-over-rf-coax/
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@anotherusername
I think you just found what I was looking for. I hit dead ends on all the searches I tried, may I ask what string you used to get those results? I asked Comcast and they mentioned "channel injection" so I got stuck on that which was a dead end.
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In all seriousness, just checked our TVs, and it looks like were using https://www.zeevee.com/ now.
They took away our NCAA Tournament >:( Something we've all watched every year I've been here.
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@polygeekery I searched for "inject channel into cable", but you should also have luck searching for "cable digital modulator".
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@jazzyjosh said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
In all seriousness, just checked our TVs, and it looks like were using https://www.zeevee.com/ now.
They took away our NCAA Tournament >:( Something we've all watched every year I've been here.
Funny story, another client has been hounding us to install something to block time wasters on the internet. I usually put projects like that off because I am morally opposed to them. We finally got around to it and a week later the same guy who has been asking us to block Facebook and stuff asks us to unblock all the sports stuff so that the employees can watch March Madness stuff online.
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For anyone who comes across this and is interested, I found the best results by ignoring "channel injection". "rf modulator hdmi" I believe got me where I needed to go. I came across this:
VeCOAX MINIMOD-2 - Professional HDMI Modulator - HDMI LICENSED
VECOAX MINIMOD-2 is a Compact HDMI Modulator to channel to distribute HD Video Over coax with real time perfect quality. Professional HDMI Video Modulator!
Which I believe will do what we need to and is expandable for a reasonable price point.
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
Due to it being a large business installation there are no cable boxes. We have a standard cable stream to work with. What we are talking about here is basically the same thing that VCRs used to do. Tune to channel 3 and play the VCR, other channels are unaffected.
Or am I missing something here?
But that isn't how VCRs used to work. You'd tune the TV to channel 3 and watch that all the time. The VCR then either played its content on channel 3, or you would use the VCR tuner to select a channel, and the VCR would pull that signal out of the incoming stream and play it on channel 3. Or 4, in places that had a broadcast channel 3, because the wiring connected to the TV, while a very poor antenna, would pick up enough of the broadcast signal to mess things up.
Fortunately, we live in a more advanced age and it looks like somebody found something that does what you actually want.
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@devjoe said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
But that isn't how VCRs used to work.
Yes it was.
@devjoe said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
You'd tune the TV to channel 3 and watch that all the time.
Who did that? We tuned to channel 3 when we wanted to use the VCR. The rest of the time we used the TV as normal. That is essentially what we are wanting to do here.
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
Who did that? We tuned to channel 3 when we wanted to use the VCR. The rest of the time we used the TV as normal. That is essentially what we are wanting to do here.
I don't remember it in great detail but we would have everything going through the VCR in order to be able to tape it. And to watch the real channel 3.
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@hungrier it is possible that we were
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@hungrier said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
I don't remember it in great detail but we would have everything going through the VCR in order to be able to tape it. And to watch the real channel 3.
It has been many moons since I even owned a VCR, but I seem to recall that the VCR would interfere with some channels when it was on. Like it gave them artifacts and interference or something.
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
@hungrier it is possible that we were
I think both ways were supported but most vcrs had a coax in and out. As mentioned, that's the only way to be able to record TV on them
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
@hungrier said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
I don't remember it in great detail but we would have everything going through the VCR in order to be able to tape it. And to watch the real channel 3.
It has been many moons since I even owned a VCR, but I seem to recall that the VCR would interfere with some channels when it was on. Like it gave them artifacts and interference or something.
It's quite possible, but that just meant there was less quality to lose when recording in EP.
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@hungrier said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
It's quite possible, but that just meant there was less quality to lose when recording in EP.
I may have phrased that poorly. I meant that if you had the VCR on but used the TV tuner you would get interference.
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@devjoe said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
But that isn't how VCRs used to work. You'd tune the TV to channel 3 and watch that all the time. The VCR then either played its content on channel 3, or you would use the VCR tuner to select a channel, and the VCR would pull that signal out of the incoming stream and play it on channel 3. Or 4, in places that had a broadcast channel 3, because the wiring connected to the TV, while a very poor antenna, would pick up enough of the broadcast signal to mess things up.
That was used
- if you wanted to tape other channels (as @hungrier mentioned)
- if your VCR was newer than the TV and supported more channels
- if your TV only had one antenna in
- if you only had one antenna
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How regular to people want to do something like this? I built something similar a few years ago, and didn't get around to finishing it (like a lot of my projects).
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@lucas1 said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
How regular to people want to do something with this?
Hmmmmm. Are you asking how often I get requests for such things? Or are you asking how often they are wanting to use it?
I am guessing the first one. Ten years in business and this is my first request for such a thing. We have done digital displays as advertising before but that is comparatively easy. For those we did HDMI over CAT5 coming from a single source. For this we have TVs that are usually used for watching cable TV programming but we are needing to inject a marketing feed in to the Comcast stream so it was the first time we have done that.
Now we have another tool in the toolbox.
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@polygeekery Oh okay. Basically I had a private Youtube like thing that ran on a network and was using either a chrome cast or DLNA connection i.e. you could choose a video on a phone / laptop / ipad to stream that video to a particular device.
I never really developed the idea further than "I can play a video to my TV over the network that I uploaded to the site".
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@polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
digital displays as advertising
"Digital Signage"!! That is the term I was trying to think of before but it eluded me.
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- Set up a computer that rips the stream of the channel you want to show
- Output to the output card, which should have an analog out
- Set up a Windows Schedule Task to, every 5 minutes, kill VLC and start a new instance of VLC with the promo
- Set up a Windows Scheduled Task to restart the initial VLC after the other VLC ends
- Output goes into an analog splitter and to each TV.
This is a good solution!
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@lorne-kates said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
- Set up a computer that rips the stream of the channel you want to show
- Set up a Windows Schedule Task to, every 5 minutes, kill VLC and start a new instance of VLC with a playlist containing the promo followed by the directshow stream
- Output to the output card, which should have an analog out
Set up a Windows Scheduled Task to restart the initial VLC after the other VLC ends....- Output goes into an analog splitter and to each TV.
- Profit!
This is a good solution!
FTFY. Don't throw two stones when one will work fine. ;)
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@Polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
@Polygeekery said in Anyone done channel injection before?:
digital displays as advertising
"Digital Signage"!! That is the term I was trying to think of before but it eluded me.
That's because your subconscious was trying to protect you from things that are Really Dangerous(TM).
